The Cop Shop: ‘I didn’t shoot myself in the penis,’ man says

It appears national reports of a Macon man shooting himself in the ding-a-ling don’t ring true. The man, in an interview with The Cop Shop, says widespread Internet pokes and an HBO comedy bit, which made public the piercing of his most private part, are mistaken. A Bibb County sheriff’s report of a June 12 “self-inflicted gunshot” outside a Zebulon Road gas mart said that the man, seated in a parked Ford Explorer, had “shot himself in the penis while holstering” his .45-caliber pistol. The report was picked up by Deadspin and the Daily Beast, and it also earned a mention on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” largely because of what the Bibb deputy noted next: That the man, 23, drove to a friend’s house and “when he took off his pants he saw that he had shot himself in the penis and that the bullet exited out his buttocks. The spent round fell out of his pants and onto the floor.” Everything about the bullet’s path is accurate, the man said, except for its point of entry. “I didn’t shoot myself in the penis. I shot myself in the pelvis,” he said by phone the other day, speaking on the condition that his name not be printed. “It didn’t hit my penis. ... My penis wouldn’t even be there anymore if it got hit with a .45, you know what I’m saying?” He said the gun somehow fired while it was pointed at his groin when he went to stick the weapon in a holster. The bullet, he said, entered about 2 centimeters from the base of his penis. He was fortunate, he added, because if it had gone in a wee bit to the left, it may have clipped his femoral artery. “And if it went a little bit right it would’ve hit my urethra,” he said. “And then it would’ve been hella bad. It would’ve messed some stuff up down there. ... That would’ve sucked. It still sucks, but I’m healing pretty fast. The exit wound’s already healed up. I don’t even feel that anymore. ... I was a lucky son of (gun).”

It was 3:40 a.m., and the yellow Camaro was going more than 150 miles an hour. A Bibb deputy cruising Interstate 75 in south Macon on June 7 first clocked the 2012 Chevy doing 105 in a 55-mph zone. The car slowed and the deputy started to pull it over, but then the Camaro took off. The deputy followed. In a straightaway south of Rocky Creek Road, the chase topped 150 mph for more than a mile, according to the deputy’s report. The car hit the brakes and stopped at the top of the Hartley Bridge Road off-ramp. The driver, a 47-year-old Douglasville man, was riding with three passengers, one of them his daughter. Asked if he’d been drinking alcohol, the driver said, “I had a couple at the club.” He agreed to a breath test, which registered .04, a report noted. Inside the purse that belonged to his front-seat passenger, a 26-year-old Warner Robins woman, another deputy found a syringe and a spoon with “a white powder substance” on it. The woman was charged with drug possession. While a deputy was taking the driver to jail, the deputy asked him why hadn’t just pulled over. “I just did a stupid thing,” the driver said.

A Lizella-area man had been assaulted by his wife’s cousin a few weeks earlier. On June 11, the cousin, 53, who’d been told by deputies not to return to the Lizella man’s property, went back anyway. And he was drunk. A Bibb sheriff’s report said he went up to one of his cousin’s children and told the kid, “I kicked your dad’s ass, boy.” The guy ran off when someone called the cops. But deputies caught up with him at a nearby trailer -- along with four marijuana plants he was allegedly cultivating.

Some former tenants of an apartment complex on Tidewater Circle in east Macon snuck in to use the pool June 4. Someone there tried to run them off, but was belittled and cussed out. The trespassers reportedly tore up an outdoor shower but were gone by the time a Bibb deputy arrived. If caught, the deputy noted in a report, they may have been in violation of state law regarding use of “opprobrious or abusive words which by their very utterance incited an immediate breach of peace.”

At the Pio Nono Avenue Kroger on June 21, an alleged shoplifter tried to make off with about $325 worth of food, alcohol and another item. A Bibb deputy’s report listed the pilfered merchandise thusly: “Steaks, Beer, Depends.”

Note to midstate law enforcement agencies: Email reports of humorous or unusual crimes and situations your officers encounter to jkovac@macon.com

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